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Jameson Irish Whiskey has taken video marketing on Instagram to another level – “the first brand to successfully utilize 3D video for advertisements on Instagram and Facebook,” according to a recent article in the Independent.

The video itself is very simple, and suggests that you slide a shot to your friend. It then proceeds to slide a shot glass of whiskey towards you, the viewer, which then appears to come off the page. It’s rather clever how they were able to create the illusion of 3D on a non-3D platform.

According to many studies, brands are increasing their content marketing budgets to include more video marketing. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are going to war to become the World’s premier video platforms, something that YouTube has enjoyed for years.

As is the case with any marketing, the ability for advertisers to cut through the noise with video marketing will continue to increase in importance. In addition, marketers should not rely on a single platform to host their videos. Regardless of who ends up winning this battle for viewership, consumers will still have their preferences. Believe it or not, some people still use MySpace, and other platforms that many abandoned long ago. This is why it’s important to ensure that your content is on all of the sites YOUR consumers visit. You never know where your next sale will begin their journey. Bear in mind, however, that to accomplish this you will either need spend a lot of time posting your video to each individual site. Or you can go the route of automation to get it done more efficiently.

Successful video marketing today demands entertaining and creative video that engages your audience. It’s not simply about having video content; it’s having the right video content. That can only be accomplished with a solid strategy that’s executed consistently.

Even a micro-video should have the same concepts behind its creation – creative, outside the box thinking – it should be engaging. What makes these type of videos a success is not any different from the winning formula for any videos — whether it be a “Why Buy from Me,” company culture-type video, or a vehicle walk-around video.

You only have a short period of time to catch and keep a consumer’s attention. Make sure that you use that time wisely and you’ll find an increase in views and conversions.

If you still aren’t sold on the importance of video marketing, it only takes a brief glimpse into recent news to illustrate just how important video is in marketing. There are many news stories relating to acquisitions, statistics and trends, which highlight the increasing importance – and value – that platforms of all kinds are placing on video content. The common thread that exists throughout all of these stories is companies recognize consumers have a strong desire to view video content and are positioning themselves to be able to serve that up.

Consider these recent stories:

Facebook videos are now receiving 3 BILLION views per day. Facebook is all about relevance. It wants to serve up content that its users want to see. A recent report by social media company, SocialBakers, reported that video posts surpassed all other types of content with the highest organic reach as well as highest fan reach. In addition, Facebook gives videos that are directly uploaded to their site more organic reach than videos shared via link from YouTube. This is in an effort to boost its own video platform. Facebook has even begun to solicit celebrities and large media companies to upload their videos straight to Facebook, rather than YouTube or other platforms.

Twitter recently renewed its agreement with Google to allow access to Twitter’s data stream. Since their breakup in 2011, Google has had to scrape Twitter in order to serve up tweets in search results. With this new agreement in place, Google can now index Twitter content in real-time providing more SEO benefits for Twitter content. Seeing as Twitter recently added a feature allowing video tweets, it’s entirely possible that Google could serve up your tweeted videos in real-time search results.

Last November, in order to deliver better video ads across its many properties, Yahoo acquired BrightRoll, a video ad delivery platform, for $640 million. One month later, they acquired Evntlive and Ptch, both of which cater to the video content industry and, according to many sources, made them the largest video platform in the United States.

Even AOL has been bolstering its video capabilities with the acquisition of three video marketing companies in the past 5 years –the 5Min video platform for $65 million in 2010, Adap.tv for $405 million in 2013 and, most recently, Vidible in December, for an estimated $50 million.

There has also been a plethora of video sharing apps emerging in the last few years such as Vine – which ultimately partnered with Twitter – and Instagram, which added a video sharing feature and was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion.

And last, but far from least, we have the largest player of them all – Google – which acquired YouTube way back in 2006, and has grown it into the second largest search engine in the world. It is currently racing Apple to become the first company to be valued at $1 trillion.

This is just a small sample of the investments major companies are making in video. It shows the importance successful businesses are placing on video content. And, I would say, a strong belief that video content is the future. I highly doubt anyone could argue against the fact that these companies know what they’re doing, simply based on their combined net value of $1.3 trillion. If all these companies were joined into one country, this humungous sum of money would place it at number 16 out of all 194 countries in the world.